After his first leading role in
The Deep
, Nick Nolte resurfaced with an amazing performance in
Who'll Stop the Rain
, playing a Marine in Vietnam caught up in a dope scam by his
disillusioned intellectual friend, Michael Moriarty. Moriarty's
trafficking is a
gesture
of disgust; he creates a mess he cannot clean up. Nolte, harking back to
a pre-counterculture style of self-reliant heroic alienation, takes
responsibility regardless of fault. He is sick of being pushed around, and
his taking on of crooked federal agents hits a nerve in audiences.
Nolte's Ray Hicks is not above corruption—we see him take
petty revenge on a party of swingers—but we are drawn to him as an
action hero whose character is lent a deeper dimension by the
film's morally complex view of the 1970s drug culture—a
complexity appreciated and conveyed by the actor.

Nolte followed this with
North Dallas Forty
, as Phillip Elliott, a pro football receiver with the best hands in the
game but unable to play the more important game of kissing the asses of
corporate owners and managers. A sports melodrama redolent of 1940s boxing
pictures (Elliott even sneaks around with the girls with one of the
hostile managers), but Nolte's relaxed, expansive presence makes a
melodramatic bind seem like a naturalistic essay. In
Who'll Stop the Rain
the actor starts out reading Nietzsche in Vietnam and ends up dead; in
North Dallas Forty
he starts out sleepless with pain and ends up unemployed, but
unencumbered and in love. Nolte's simmering magnificence can
plausibly move either way.

Some of his finest performances, perhaps surprisingly given his macho
image, have been as artists. In Roger Spottiswoode's
Under Fire
, about photojournalists in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution,
Nolte plays a photographer who agrees to aid the leftists by faking a
photo but, with his thoroughgoing commitment as a performer, he makes
clear the character's moral dilemma in reaching this decision, both
in his dealings with his colleagues, and with the guerrillas and
mercenaries. In "Life Lessons," Martin Scorsese's
segment in
New York Stories
, Nolte is Lionel Dobie, an abstract-expressionist painter trying to keep
his assistant from quitting but inadequate to giving her the necessary
reassurance. It's a gem of a performance, with Nolte's
massive frame housing a nervy, lumberingly foolish, obsessive man, who is
at once a palpably inspired artist.

For such a big man and big-guy star, Nolte is extraordinarily versatile,
convincing as the bearlike bum who liberates Richard Dreyfuss and Bette
Midler's Beverly Hills household in Paul Mazursky's
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
, and as the stolid small-town sheriff in Walter Hill's
Extreme Prejudice
. He can play sensitive without playing educated, as in
Weeds
, without allowing his sensitivity to block the route to effective action.
He can also play men who are
outmaneuvered, as he is by Debra Winger in
Everybody Wins
, without losing his force. And in a big-budget romance such as
Prince of Tides
, he eloquently combines the characteristics of an overgrown adolescent,
baiting his wife, with the sleek, solid romantic wooing Barbra
Streisand's swank Manhattan psychoanalyst, but able later to
collapse weeping in her arms.

At times, however, he has played weak men in films whose scripts have
blunted his opportunity to excel.
Cape Fear
, for example, strings him up to satisfy Scorsese's meretricious
insistence on turning a revenge thriller into a redemption story, and
Nolte seems beset less by De Niro's psycho than by a script that
presents him with compromises and failures. Likewise, James L.
Brooks's
I'll Do Anything
diminishes Nolte in his role as an out-of-work actor hoping to star in a
remake of
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
, while the revisionist script for
Jefferson in Paris
, while forcing Nolte's Jefferson to confront the contradiction of
being both slave owner and freedom fighter leaves him foundering without a
rejoinder.

But Nolte, more than any other current star, leaves his bad roles behind
him, and the fact that he does not seem overexposed is a tribute to the
fundamental honesty of his acting.

Weathered into an aging leonine presence of undiminished animal magnetism,
whose appetite for wide-ranging work sees him into the good, the bad and
the indifferent, Nolte always gives of his best, contributing noteworthy
portrayals to too-little-seen films. There is his libidinous, charming
handyman, avoiding unforgiving wife Julie Christie's emotional
devastation in Alan Rudolph's
Afterglow
; and his performances in Keith Gordon's
Mother Night
and Rudolph's
Breakfast of Champions
, both ambitious stabs at adapting Kurt Vonnegut. In the former, Nolte
excels as the somber, incarcerated Nazi propagandist/Allied spy withdrawn
into reflections on personal responsibility; in the latter, he is
hilarious as a closeted cross-dressing car salesman.

Affliction
, Paul Schrader's bleak and painful exploration of men's
violence, is made bearable because of the star's courageous and
selfless performance as a hard-drinking, pot-smoking, small-town sheriff,
whose investigation of a suspicious death becomes bound up with the
feelings of inadequacy instilled in him by a terrifying father. This weak,
wretched man is so disturbingly well-observed that he commands sympathy.
Schrader's inspired casting of James Coburn as the abusive father
allows the virile, physically imposing Nolte to play off another icon of
masculinity and, in the sinister presence of Coburn, Nolte, intimidated
and cringing, makes one—as so often—feel the scars he bears.
One might have to seek Nick Nolte out a little, but once found, there are
no barriers—he is as generous as nature made him.

—Alan Dale, updated by Robyn Karney

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